PrintI take the subway because I like to watch the people: the kids weaving in and out between the center poles, new mothers keeping watchful eyes over their infants, businessmen reading the paper on their way to work. The incessant chatter clears my mind and relaxes my muscles.
Most college kids would cab it this early in the morning, but I need this time to myself. The calm before the storm.
The only reason I am up at all is because my sister has never been to New York before and I didn’t want her getting on the 2 and ending up God knows where. The city has a different life at 7 am, filled with busy, working people that I am rarely aware of.
I close my eyes and let the subway’s peculiar music hum around me. In certain stations, the screeching as the brakes release rises in the opening notes of “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. In others there is just one clear, high note.
My sister and I are not close. The last time I saw her, over winter break, she was monopolizing everybody’s time and attention with her college applications. Now she knows she is going to Princeton, and I know I won’t hear the end of it. Thank God for New York City, the one thing I can still hold over her head.
Not that I don’t love Columbia. It just that, when say you go to Princeton, people don’t ask if you mean the country. And anyway, I’m in that Junior slump where all my friends are getting ready to graduate and I just wish I could get out of this school with them.
How funny would it be if I didn’t show up to get her? I rarely get off campus anymore, except when I have to visit a museum for Art Hum.
I imagine walking around downtown, through Chelsea and then the Flatiron District. In reality, if I looked at a map of New York, I would still have a hard time pointing out TriBeCa, or demarcating the boundaries of the Lower East Side.
My sister probably knows the city better than I do. She has probably been studying maps, charting courses for our great adventures because she doesn’t trust me to know where to take her. Her to-do list will probably include a shopping foray on Fifth Avenue, breakfast on the Upper East Side, a trip to Times Square on Saturday night, an elevator ride to the top of the Empire State Building, orchestra seating at a Broadway show.
My plans—a tour of the Frick Museum, picnic lunch in Central Park, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge—in all likelihood won’t make the cut. At least I planned a party for her tonight. She probably won’t complain about that.
The train lurches to a stop at 34th Street and I hurry out into the crowd, surprised by how many people are already charging about their super-busy lives so early.
Down I go, into the massive warren of passageways and tunnels that seethe beneath the topsoil of New York. In the main hall of the station, classical music tries to soothe while people run to catch their trains. I’d always found that the music made me even more frantic when running late, but now, it makes the wait more enjoyable: My sister’s train is delayed by a few minutes.
Soon people are pouring up from the tracks below. I strain, waiting for a small figure in pink to emerge among the suits. The stream of people begins to thin, and still there is no sign of her. My stomach begins to tighten with the strain of waiting and a growing anxiety. It’s not my fault if she got lost before even getting here. I’m not very convincing.
Suddenly, I realize that there are two escalators up from the train. If she had been sitting towards the rear of the train, she would have come up behind me. I hurry to the other exit, wondering how I will explain it to our parents.
The music is folding in on me, a rising crescendo that corresponds exactly with my desperate footsteps. People have stopped rising from below and I still don’t see her anywhere. I glance around the cavernous hall, at a loss. I check my cell phone, but she hasn’t called. I begin to think she has been mugged and carted off somewhere, bleeding and dying in some alley where I have no way of finding her.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and spin around, ready to finally put my self-defense class to some use.
“I’m so glad I found you,” my sister says. “The handle to my bag broke when I was getting off the train, so it took me a while to get up here.” It’s amazing. For once I’m actually happy to see her. And for once, I’m doing the finding; and she’s the one who had to be found.